Lab assignments and discussion for the JOUR 230 students at Lehigh University.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Sam's class reflection

I found this class to be the most valuable for me in terms of practicing my skills. The class was said to be a lot about giving us the tools and doing brief overviews. I had already had some experiences with multimedia and the things we learned, so I enjoyed delving into the tools more in depth and filling in some of the gaps I had. Like with Timeline, I didn't know you could embed things like Tweets. Or with Storify, I practiced creating more cohesive storylines with multiple elements.

The thing I was most proud of was my documentary video. It was a lot of hard work but I learned a lot about filming and editing. And it's really awesome to have a work sample of an 8 minute high quality documentary. It was also exciting to win a Williams Prize for my videos. It was probably the most new thing I learned in this class and therefore the largest area where I strengthened my skills and feel like I made a large improvement.

Another favorite thing that I produced was my final multimedia package. More than anything, it showed me that any and every article had the potential to be more than just writing. Every article can be dressed up and made more interactive and interesting with the addition of some multimedia elements. It doesn't have to be a once a semester thing – it can be adding bits here and there as well as taking time to create more polished packages.

I liked the curation project a lot, but I just don't know if I picked the best topic. It was something I was really passionate about and knew a lot about, but I found it hard to break into in terms of being an expert. It was a rather exclusive community where people didn't really care what others had to say. Those with connections have the monopoly on information and breaking news in the industry. Tweeting the links helped establish myself with some smaller people who would retweet my blog posts and my information, but I didn't see a way to further advance myself when there was a limited amount of stuff for me to comment on. And I didn't really feel like my opinions would matter or make an impact.

I had a few blog posts get a lot of posts after putting them on Reddit and good timing of writing them. But a time when I tried to create my own new content by pulling facts I found on a Reddit thread commented by a band member, he saw it and Tweeted at me that it was weird. So that was kind of a failure.

I think my favorite part of the curation project was the online community, which I know wasn't popular for others. I really liked being on Reddit. It felt less exclusive than Twitter and was a place where I could go to learn as well as discuss the topic that I was so passionate about – with other people who were just as passionate as me. I didn't have to try to connect with the people out there on Twitter, because on Reddit they're all already in the same place. It informed the other two parts of my curation project – material to blog about and providing me links to tweet. I still find myself checking it and using it to keep updated on the music I like.